“The yips are that ghastly time when, with the first movement of the putter, the golfer blacks out, loses sight of the ball and hasn’t the remotest idea of what to do with the putter or occasionally, that he is holding a putter at all.” – Tommy Armour
By Ian Hardie
Buried in the middle of the post ‘Personal performance’
Was an admission that soon after I started playing golf again
There was a teeny tiny problem with one part of my game
Well ok, it was a major problem
I had for whatever reason developed ‘the yips’ while chipping
The effect on my scores that ‘the chipping yips’ had wasn’t pleasant
Much like the guy whose quote is at the top of this post
He had ‘the putting yips’ as you will have read
His apparently turned up one week after he won the 1927 U.S. Open
At the Shawnee Open in 1927, Armour made history by scoring a 23 on a par 5, for 18-over par
This still stands as the highest score on one hole in PGA history
I haven’t been able to find out just how much of that 23 was made up of putts
But I understand it was most of it
Anyway, since ‘the yips’ arrived in my game
I have – as you can imagine
Been working away at getting rid of them
At the same time
I have been doing a lot of research into just exactly what causes them
And why they only seem to affect some golfers
Very soon I am going to launch a study that is aimed at getting to the bottom of ‘the yips’
As currently, no one really knows why they turn up in some golfer’s games
I’m going to attempt to have as many ‘yips golfers’ as possible around the world
Complete a bunch of questions I have come up with
To see if I can prove that there are some common factors that lead to the yips
And in doing so come up with the actual cure for them
Because no one has really nailed that yet either
So I thought I’d share a little of what I have been working on with you
Before I launch the study
It’s a brief overview of what is known about the yips so far
The common wisdom of how the yips come about tells us that there are two types of yip
Which are imaginatively called Type I and Type II
Type I is considered to be “the impaired movement initiation and execution” of a fine motor skill
Which in basic terms means that for yips golfers
One of the golfers hands (generally not both interestingly enough)
Doesn’t do what it should as the golfer is about the contact the ball
The golfer is simply not in control of what it does
As a result the ball doesn’t go where the golfer wants it too
Type II is related to what’s called performance anxiety which can just as easily labelled ‘stage fright’
This manifests itself in two common ways
Firstly the golfer takes an inordinately long period of time over the ball prior to hitting their shot
Mainly due to the massive amount of ‘stuff’ swirling around their brain at that point
Then secondly, when they are finally able to ‘pull the trigger’ and hit the shot
It’s most likely that the resulting shot will be nothing like what they were intending
Which gives them a shot that is exactly the same as a Type I yips golfer
But I’m not exactly convinced that it is caused by the same thing
One of the most fundamental unanswered questions about the yips
Is which comes first?
Does the physical result of a single Type I shot provide the beginnings on an infinite loop of Type II?
Or does a missed putt at a single critical point in time trigger Type II and as a result over time affect the golfers brain so much that Type I becomes common place?
It’s the classic ‘Which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ situation
It’s one of the main goals of the study to find this out
The common wisdom that gave us those two types
Will also go on to generalize that in the main
Its good golfers – top amateurs and golf pros – that have played for a fairly long time that suffer from Type I
Simply due to the millions upon millions of shots they will have hit over their careers
Whereas Type II sufferers will be more likely to be older and have been not so proficient at the game of golf over the years
While I can see some logic in these generalizations
They still don’t explain why some golf pros for example can play for 40 years or more on tour
And never have a single yip
Whereas I have seen other golfers who are fairly average at golf but not old (late 20’s to early 30’s)
Who darn near yip every putt and chip they hit
It certainly doesn’t explain why sufferers are almost always male golfers
Either way the first thing that a yips golfer needs to avoid if they start getting the yips
Is that first reaction that we all have as golfers
To head out to the course
After that little ‘break that we all have’
And attempt to ‘fix the yips’ by practice
Why you ask?
Look out for the answer to that question in “Journey into the yips – part two”
Until then
Play well
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